From number plates to drug development, the personal is big business and the individual has never been more important. Precision medicine is gaining ground with clinical trials centred around one person, not overall average results, becoming increasingly significant.
Last month Nature, ran an article highlighting how everyday millions of drugs are taken that have no effect on the patient. The piece stated: “The top ten highest grossing drugs in the United States help between 1 and 25 and 1 and 4 of the people who take them. For some drugs, such as statins – routinely used to lower cholestrol – as few as 1 in 50 may benefit. There are even drugs that are harmful to certain ethnic groups because of the bias towards white Western participants in classic clinical trials.”